Rare Earthenware

Unknown Fields is a nomadic design research studio directed by Kate Davies and Liam Young. The studio members venture out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies, and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes—the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, the irradiated, and the pristine—are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. In such a landscape of interwoven narratives, the studio uses film and animation to chronicle this network of hidden stories and reimagine the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

Rare earth metals are the fundamental materials that enable the featherweight, slim, and seamless aesthetics of our contemporary technologies. As our personal electronics tend toward the invisible, they conjure in their shadows an undeniably visible gray mountain, a one-kilometer deep pit, and a ten-kilometer radioactive tailings lake, a counterweight to the apparent immateriality of computing, communications, and electric energy.

Unknown Fields has used the toxic mud from this radioactive tailings lake in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, to craft a set of three ceramic vessels.

Each vase is sized in relation to the amount of waste created in the production of three items of technology—a smartphone, a featherweight laptop, and the cell of a smart-car battery. With a slightly shimmering burnish from the reaction of the mineral content during firing, the vessels are the material shadow of a valuable technological object.